Another gorgeous day in…. Istanbul?

I had plans to visit Azerbajian and possibly Armenia but about a month ago my flight was cancelled (still trying to get my refund) and everything flew into chaos. Istanbul is the travel hub for this area so I routed through there and orginally was going to spent 12 hours back here before my next flight, got another email two days ago that my flight out of Istanbul is postponed 12 hours so…. 24 more hours in Istanbul.

Got up this morning feeling a bit euphoric, dropped my pack at the airport and took the subway into the city, took a bit to realize the good feelings are cuz I really like Istanbul and am happy to have another day to poke around.

My flight from Tbilisi was very late and I didn’t get to bed until after 2am, didn’t get into the city today until about 1pm, so…

Lunch!

This is my favourite thing from Istanbul, Isikul Kebab, ground lamb with a tomato sauce on a bed of turkish flatbread that soaks it all up plus tons of amazing yogurt, really exploding with flavour, the orange dip is roasted red pepper and paprika and walnut and olive oil and is the first thing I will try to recreate when I get back to Vancouver.

After lunch took the ride to the Asian side again and walked along the water a loooong way…

Dessert!

Scoop of caramel, scoop of cherry, chocolate dip.

These buskers were playing some sort of Turkish folk music, I was captivated and stopped for a coffee across the street to listen, at one point they attracted quite a crowd, about 100 people, some of them singing along, yay.